


Carolers Ouside the Door of an Empty House

by MistyBeethoven



Category: John Wick (Movies)
Genre: Acceptance, Belief, Christmas, Christmas Caroling, Crisis of Faith, Death, Doubt, F/M, God - Freeform, Grief/Mourning, Hospitalization, Hospitals, Humanity, Love, Melancholy, Mortality, Sad, Snow, Spiritual, True Love, faith - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21757552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistyBeethoven/pseuds/MistyBeethoven
Summary: On Helen's final Christmas, John Wick reflects on mortality and his love for his dying wife.
Relationships: Helen Wick/John Wick, Jimmy & John Wick
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	Carolers Ouside the Door of an Empty House

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Keidence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keidence/gifts).



> For the sublimely talented Keidence, whose story "Matches" is perfect. Check it out here:
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/20396200/chapters/48378064
> 
> I'm not sure, Keidence, if you'll like this as a gift but I hope you will. :)
> 
> Readers may either find this probably very depressing or too over the top maudlin like some complain about Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop." 
> 
> I've personally never read that novel by Dickens so I can't say my thoughts on little Nell. I like to check something out for myself before making up my mind about it. I do know that, however, Stephen King was wrong when he said Oscar Wilde was laughing about "The Little Match Girl" being too melodramatically sad. It was once again about little Nell. Not sure if anybody laughs about the little Match Girl. I certainly never have. But then again, Stephen King also said that Bambi's mom died in a forest fire and his dad was shot by a hunter once. 
> 
> But I still love you, Stephen. We all make mistakes.
> 
> All that said (and much of it needlessly so) I cried while I was writing this.

"The Carolers will come and nobody will be here," John Wick kept thinking as he put on his jacket and prepared to visit his wife in the hospital.

It was nearing Christmas and the snow was coming down heavily outside, giving a fresh coat to the one already painted only a few days ago as this stray thought hit him. It was an odd thing to think, the erstwhile assassin knew; not unlike one of the unique pieces of frozen artwork outside. Yet it had landed on to him, melting into his mind until it became a constant contemplation throughout the day.

The Carolers would come to the house to sing but nobody would be there to greet them for Helen was dying in a hospital room and he would be spending another night by her side.

* * *

"Do you want some water?"John asked as the woman opened her eyes and stared at him.

"Yes."

John Wick went and poured his wife a glass of water from the pitcher by her hospital bed.

"Is your pillow all right?" he asked after she had managed to sit up to drink it.

"They need a little fluffing," Helen Wick said with a smile as she leaned forward for him to take the flattened object and make it better.

She was used to all the little ways her husband tried to handle the situation of her illness by now; she was aware that since he knew that he had no control in her failing health he could, at least, focus on things that were in his ability to take care of. Throughout his visits, he continually made sure that she was as comfortable as possible. It lessened his own discomfort at watching her die. Because of this, Helen Wick let him even though she was not one to be fussed over.

Watching John fluff her pillow and thinking that it looked more like he was killing the poor thing, the woman tried not to think about her husband's former life and that he had once been an assassin. She was merely watching a man take out his current frustration on an inanimate object, she wearily reminded herself. John was not imagining that the pillow was another human being: he was seeing it as the disease which had slowly been killing her, Helen Wick knew.

Just as she understood that the slow part was soon to be over and the dying part as well. Dying was something you did while you still had some life in you left to be stolen. Helen could feel that hers had pretty well been taken. A few months she gave herself and then dying would merely become dead.

His assault on the pillow now completed, John now placed the pillow gently behind her head and Helen prepared to spend the rest of her conscious state in peaceful and shared silence with her husband. With a man like John, silence would always be a necessity. He was not one for words and she delighted in the fact that the quiet between them had always been comfortable. The person whom replaced her would have to understand this about the man she would freely give to them on the one condition that John Wick loved them wholeheartedly in return.

Helen was surprised then when John spoke once he had returned to the chair he had been sitting in as she had been sleeping. "Do you think the Carolers will show up tonight?"

She looked at the man she loved and smiled again at the random question. Her eyes drifted to the window to finally notice that it was snowing outside. "I don't know," she replied. "Are they scheduled to do the rounds today?"

"Yes," John said with a nod for good measure.

"I guess they will then; just incase you are there," she mused. "Jimmy might think it will cheer you up."

"I want to stay here," John Wick stated.

Helen tilted her head on the pillow to gaze at the handsome figure of her frowning spouse. He looked so somber and she could see the snow still falling outside behind him through the large window. "And disappoint our neighbors John?" she scolded. "No. You'll go home, listen to them and then come back to me."

John looked positively upset at the order. Still he acquiesced soon, not wishing to tire her out with an argument.

"What will you ask them to sing, John Wick?" Helen asked.

The bearded man stared at her and then glanced behind him out the window. Turning back to his wife he answered, "Let it Snow."

Helen Wick smiled in amusement but lost consciousness before she could inquire why her husband had chosen that particular song.

* * *

Walking through the hospital's sterile corridors, John found himself staring at the yuletide decorations that they had placed on the doors and the halls to make the place more festive and cheery; cheery was not a word he would ever be able to associate with this building, he now realized.

The man thought of Helen and his own boxes filled with lights and tinsel, decorations and ornaments and felt guilty that he had not found the time to place them in their intended places. Even the door that would greet the Carolers that night would be horribly bare, devoid of the Christmas wreath that had adorned it for the past five years. Usually Helen saw to that herself but John made a mental note to do it first thing when he arrived home.

During the last few years, despite his wife's illness, she had always insisted to be brought home the week of Christmas. No matter how sick Helen was, she would scold or flatter the Doctor enough to let her return to the house that she shared with the husband that adored her. There, lying on the couch, she could watch him put up the tree. Or bundled up like an eskimo she would venture outside to laugh as he put up the lights; joking that while he was known the world over as the dreaded Baba Yaga he still could not successfully find the faulty bulb or string them up exactly straight.

In retaliation, John would gently throw a snowball in her direction and miss his target on purpose. He had killed quite a few people with icicles or snowballs but he would never confess this to his wife.

He simply _could_ not.

Having Helen Wick look at him in fear or with disgust was something that terrified the man whom was believed to be fearless.

Home once again, snow still spilling from the sky like ephemeral diamonds, John went to the basement to retrieve the wreath for the door. As he walked towards the box that had kept it safe all year long, he did not think about the weapons or gold coins hidden beneath his feet. He hated them after all. That life, now buried away for five years, tormented him sometimes; as did the damned and infamous impossible task that he had performed.

What good had it done him in the grand scheme of things, John thought as he stared at the wreath with its large red bow, fake gold bells and snow white dove: Had it saved Helen Wick? Would he be able to watch her as she grew old, something he had secretly delighted in doing because he had loved her so much this prospect had even been craved by him?

No. The ground now frozen would soon welcome her in a short time and there was nothing he could do to change it.

Viggo Tarasov had offered him a life with Helen on one condition. But God did not offer to any man, believer or doubter, one single Impossible Task to change His mind once It had been decided.

Staring at the wreath and into the black eyes of the unseeing bird at its top, John lowered his head and wept over the stubbornness of God.

* * *

Waiting in the living room for the Carolers to arrive, John Wick allowed his thoughts to return to this God.

When Helen had become ill, he had tried to turn away from Him. Nothing good could exist that would let something so innocent suffer he had reasoned. Back then there had been hope as well. A chance that Science could help heal his dying wife when God had closed His ears and would seemingly no longer listen. Has Science had failed also, John Wick had found himself angrily returning to the idea of a Creator. For even if something good would not allow such agony, it seemed equally foolish to believe that someone as good as Helen could have existed without some kind of design or purpose. 

John did not want her to be gone; could not accept the idea willingly that when she took that last breath the woman he had loved with all his heart would simply vanish and be no more. Memories brought little comfort then. While he would try to keep on living for as long as possible without her, in order to remember her existence (and fearing that there was no place for him in any Heaven: Helen having been the only one to ever be offered to a man like himself,) he knew that all memories were taken eventually anyway to their own respective graves by the death of those left behind.

John Wick wanted an existence for Helen Wick outside of memories and he did not want her to be truly gone. Even if it meant that his own current torment was punishment for his past sins, even if he would burn in hell when his own life was over, John Wick was willing to return, however tentatively, to His God if it meant Helen Wick existed somewhere after she had died.

The former assassin's mind once more fell to the morning's vision of Carolers outside the door of an empty house. He wondered if that was what life and death were: The existence of hope on the other side of a door.

But which one was it, John Wick, contemplated; was all of mankind the Carolers whom imagined something better on the other side of a door which was only empty, trying to gain attention from something that was not really there?

Or were the ones that had been loved and lost, the ones who waited patiently on the other side of the door, trying to offer hope to those whom had turned off the lights and walked away in their despair and exhaustion from waiting and trying to understand the loss and pain they were left to blindly suffer?

If you listened close enough would you be able to hear and finally know?

As he heard the first few notes of "Silent Night," John Wick was no closer to an answer: the only choice to make anymore being to simply answer the door.

* * *

Helen was asleep when he arrived back at the hospital. An orderly showed him in but he had prevented them from waking her, simply holding a finger to his lips to indicate silence. John quietly sat down in the chair that always similarly sat waiting for him.

Placing the gifts he had brought for his wife, John wondered if she would live long enough to enjoy them.

Jimmy had been with the Carolers. The policeman had not mentioned Helen, obviously already knowing the reason for her absence and the pain it would inevitably bring to his friend if the subject was broached. Instead the two men had exchanged polite and friendly hellos and Wick had stood in the doorway to patiently listen to the few songs offered to him.

When John Wick had requested "Let it Snow" they had tried to sing it but had obviously not practiced this particular song at all. It was a lyrically incorrect thing but at least they had tried and this had offered John some comfort.

"Can I tell you why I wanted that song?"John Wick whispered to his sleeping wife whom could not hear him. "I was on a mission once, in St. Petersburg: to kill some man...a stranger. A lot of them were those: people I didn't know. It was Christmas and it was snowing. I stopped to stare at the snowflakes on my black gloves. Not one of them was the same just like they told me they were when I was a child...

"There was one that landed on me...I marvelled at how beautiful it was. To me it was better than the others. When it did finally melt...I died a little. 

"My target came out and I was about to pull the trigger and then I stopped. Right then...all we were...all a human being was was nothing more than a snowflake. It is here and it is unique and then it's gone and we don't know why and if anybody really saw it.

"Or will remember it.

"I let him go. I couldn't kill him. Even though that didn't stop me from killing others after...that night, I couldn't do it."

John Wick turned to look out the window behind him as the snow continued its slow descent somewhat lighting the darkness of the sky it was falling in.

"But tonight, again, all we are is snowflakes and we are all going to die but we are all special so...let it snow."

Turning back to look at the peaceful face of his wife, John smiled as he remembered the snowflake on his gloved hand and how after all these years he could still recall each one of its angles and lines even after it had melted into nothing. 

Just as he would remember Helen Wick when she had left him too.

**Author's Note:**

> Some of this is based on my experiences with my mom's death. She died shortly after Christmas, nearing 6 years ago. She didn't tell my sister or myself that she had been battling cancer for years. When she finally did in January 2015 she died 10 days later. 
> 
> Going in to her bedroom, I sometimes see the gifts we bought for her that last Christmas and I know that she hardly had the chance to use them. It often reminds me that you cannot take it with you when it is time to leave this world.
> 
> With this fact in mind, I urge everyone to give to each other something that we can carry with us always: love and good memories. 
> 
> God bless you and much love this season and always! <3


End file.
